A 10-minute read on whether ramping up oil and gas extraction would actually fix anything
The TL;DR
A growing political argument says Britain should ditch its renewables push, fire up the North Sea, and reclaim its energy freedom. It sounds compelling: our oil, our gas, our prices, our jobs.
The trouble is the numbers don’t really back it up. The North Sea is roughly 93% drained. What’s left is expensive to get out, mostly destined for export, and would barely move the needle on your gas bill because oil and gas are sold at global prices set in places like Rotterdam and Singapore. Even Norway, with twenty times more state-controlled production than us, paid European prices during the energy crisis.
Renewables aren’t a silver bullet either. Wind doesn’t blow on demand and the grid still leans on gas to fill the gaps. But the economics have shifted dramatically. New offshore wind now undercuts new gas-fired power, batteries are scaling fast, and the UK already gets more than half its electricity from clean sources.
Below is the case, in plain English, with the evidence laid out so you can decide for yourself.
What the political pitch actually says
The argument runs roughly like this:
- Wind and solar are intermittent, so we’ll always need backup
- Britain still has substantial oil and gas under the North Sea
- Domestic production means energy independence and protection from world prices
- Net zero is making us poorer; let’s use what we’ve got
It’s a tidy story. Let’s check each plank against the evidence.
Chapter 1: How much is actually left
The North Sea Transition Authority — the official UK regulator — publishes the numbers each October. As of end-2024:
- Proven and probable reserves: 2.9 billion barrels of oil equivalent, down from 3.3 billion just a year earlier
- Total already produced since the 1960s: 47.7 billion barrels
- Peak oil production: 1999, when we pulled out roughly 6 million barrels a day
- Today: about 1 million barrels a day, falling to 660,000 by 2029 on the regulator’s own forecast
In four exploration wells drilled in 2024, the industry found less than 100 million barrels between them. Production outpaced new discoveries by more than four to one.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit puts it bluntly: about 93% of the cumulative North Sea total has already been extracted. Even if you take the oil-and-gas industry’s most optimistic “no constraints” scenario — which the industry itself admits is unrealistic — you still end up with 86% already gone.
This isn’t a story about choosing between fossil fuels and renewables. It’s a story about a depleted basin in structural decline whatever anyone says about it.
Chapter 2: Why “drilling more” wouldn’t lower your gas bill
This is the bit most people get wrong, and it matters.
Oil and gas are globally traded commodities. A barrel of crude in Rotterdam, Cushing or the North Sea sells at the same world price, give or take quality and shipping. UK gas trades on the National Balancing Point, which moves in lockstep with the European TTF hub. Our pipelines plug straight into Norway and the Continent.
If a UK operator pumps an extra million barrels out of the North Sea, they don’t have to sell it to British drivers at a discount. They sell it on the world market. In fact, about 80% of UK North Sea oil already gets exported because British refineries are configured for sweeter, lower-sulphur grades. Only 7.7% of the oil refined in UK plants in 2024 came from our own waters, down from 50% in 1996.
You don’t have to take my word for it:
- The Climate Change Committee told government that increased UK extraction “would not materially affect global oil or gas prices”
- The UK Energy Research Centre said additional production would have “negligible impact on the UK cost of living”
- Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise modelled it and found household bills could fall £16 to £82 a year (1–4.6%) under maximum extraction. By contrast, decoupling electricity prices from gas could cut bills by around £330 a year — three to four times more
The cleanest test of all is Norway. They produce roughly twenty times more oil and gas per head than we do. They own their reserves through a state-controlled company. And in winter 2022, Norwegian households paid some of the highest electricity prices in Europe — because their gas sells into the European market at European prices.
Domestic production doesn’t insulate consumers when the commodity is freely traded. It just doesn’t.
Chapter 3: Who actually owns the oil
Here’s a quietly inconvenient fact. Britain doesn’t own the North Sea oil and gas. We own the seabed, but the moment a licence is granted, the hydrocarbons belong to whoever is operating the field — BP, Shell, Equinor (which is 67% owned by the Norwegian state, ironically), Harbour Energy, Ithaca Energy, TotalEnergies and a handful of others.
The UK takes its cut through tax. The current headline rate on North Sea profits is 78% — corporation tax (30%) plus a supplementary charge (10%) plus the Energy Profits Levy (38%, runs until 2030). That sounds eye-watering, and it is, but the basin is also generous with reliefs for decommissioning costs.
Tax receipts in context:
- Peak: £12.4 billion in 2008/09 (worth around £18 billion in today’s money)
- 2022/23: £9 billion (post-Ukraine spike)
- 2024/25: £4.5 billion
- Forecast 2025/26: £2.7 billion
Compare that to Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — the result of taxing and state-owning their oil — which now stands at over $1.5 trillion. Estimates of what Britain could have built had we copied Norway run from $400 billion to £850 billion. About £13,000 for every person in the country, give or take. That ship sailed in the 1980s, but it’s worth remembering when politicians talk about North Sea oil as “Britain’s birthright”. It largely isn’t.
Chapter 4: What about the new fields — Rosebank, Jackdaw, Cambo?
These are the headline projects the “drill more” lobby points to.
Rosebank, west of Shetland: about 300 million barrels recoverable, mostly oil. First production scheduled for late 2026. Plateau output around 70,000 barrels a day for two or three years before decline. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 1% of UK gas demand (the field is 90% oil), and the oil is the wrong grade for UK refineries — most of it will be exported.
Cost: around $3.8 billion in capital investment for Phase 1 alone. The deepest field ever developed on the UK Continental Shelf, sitting in over a kilometre of water in some of the harshest conditions in the Atlantic.
Jackdaw (Shell): a smaller gas project, also in legal limbo.
Cambo (Ithaca Energy): final investment decision now slated for 2026/27, first oil “late 2020s or early 2030s”. Shell pulled out in 2021.
In January 2025, the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled the Rosebank and Jackdaw consents unlawful because the environmental impact assessments hadn’t accounted for combustion emissions. This followed a Supreme Court ruling, R (Finch) v Surrey County Council, where Lord Leggatt observed the obvious:
“It is known with certainty that, if the project goes ahead, all the oil extracted from the ground will inevitably be burnt thereby releasing greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere in a quantity which can readily be estimated.”
You can argue the legal point either way, but the practical result is that any new field now has to honestly count what happens when its product is set on fire. That changes the maths.
Chapter 5: The cost of getting it out
The North Sea is one of the more expensive basins on the planet to operate.
- UK Continental Shelf operating cost: £19.49 per barrel in 2024 (NSTA)
- Saudi Arabia: roughly $7-9 per barrel
- OPEC median: about $5.40 per barrel
- US shale: $46-54 breakeven
Why so high? Smaller fields, deeper water, ageing infrastructure, more people on board per barrel produced. Costs rise as output falls because fixed costs get spread across fewer barrels.
Then there’s decommissioning — the unavoidable bill for plugging wells, removing platforms and clearing pipelines when fields close. The NSTA estimates this at £44 billion in total, with around £27 billion of it falling between 2023 and 2032. Wood Mackenzie noted “over £17 billion will be spent on UK decommissioning by 2029 — twice that of any other country”.
A chunk of that bill lands on the taxpayer because operators can offset decommissioning costs against past tax paid. The NSTA itself has flagged about £10.8 billion in lost taxes from accelerating decommissioning. The “free oil” isn’t free.
Chapter 6: But what about renewables and the intermittency problem?
This is the strongest plank in the “drill more” argument, and it deserves a fair hearing.
Wind doesn’t blow on demand. Solar doesn’t generate at night. In a still January high-pressure week, you can stare at a UK weather chart and feel a real sense of unease about where the electricity is going to come from.
Here’s what the data says about how the UK is actually managing it:
- 2024 electricity mix: renewables 50.4%, nuclear 14.3%, gas 30%, imports the rest. First full calendar year with renewables above half
- Offshore wind capacity factor: 40.5% in England in 2024, forecast to rise to about 57% by 2030 with bigger turbines
- Battery storage on the grid: from 4.5 GW at end-2024 to 6.9 GW by end-2025, with a target of 23-27 GW by 2030
- Interconnectors to France, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland: about 9-10 GW of two-way capacity
- Pumped hydro: 2.8 GW (Dinorwig in Wales does 0-1.7 GW in 16 seconds)
- The last coal plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, closed on 30 September 2024
Gas is still essential as a backup, and will be for years. Nobody serious is denying that. The question is whether gas should be the foundation of the system or the safety net for the system.
On cost: new offshore wind in the most recent auction (AR7, January 2026) cleared at around £91 per MWh in 2024 prices. New gas-fired power costs around £147 per MWh on current build prices. New nuclear (Hinkley Point C) is contracted at £92.50 per MWh in 2012 money — about £128 per MWh today, for 35 years, with construction now running £46 billion against an initial £18 billion estimate.
In other words, renewables are now the cheapest new-build power in Britain. Not “cheap once subsidies kick in” — cheapest, full stop. That doesn’t fix intermittency on its own. It does mean that every time someone says “renewables are too expensive”, the auction data quietly disagrees.
Chapter 7: Could clean power genuinely do it?
The honest answer is yes for electricity, harder for total energy.
Electricity is currently about 20% of total UK final energy use. The other 80% — heating, transport, industrial heat — is mostly fossil-fuelled. The transition the Climate Change Committee maps out doesn’t just decarbonise electricity. It electrifies everything else: heat pumps replacing gas boilers, EVs replacing petrol cars, hydrogen and electric arc furnaces replacing industrial gas burners.
That requires electricity demand to roughly double or treble by 2050, and offshore wind to grow from today’s 16 GW to over 100 GW. It’s an enormous build-out. It is also, on the CCC’s numbers, achievable — and at a net cost of less than 1% of GDP cumulatively over thirty years.
Where the strain genuinely shows:
- Grid connections: there are projects waiting years to plug in
- Planning: onshore wind in particular has been bogged down for a decade, only just unblocked
- Supply chain: offshore wind supply chains are stretched globally, pushing recent prices up
- Skilled labour: electricians, grid engineers, offshore technicians all in short supply
These are real bottlenecks. They aren’t reasons the transition can’t happen. They’re reasons it requires actual industrial strategy, not slogans.
Chapter 8: Jobs, Aberdeen, and the human cost
This is where the “drill more” argument has its most legitimate emotional weight, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away.
The oil and gas industry trade body says it supports 154,000 jobs across the wider offshore energy sector, with about 84,000 in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire alone. Other counts (the ONS) put direct employment closer to 28,000. The truth is somewhere in the middle once you count contractors, supply chain and induced employment.
Robert Gordon University projects the UK oil and gas workforce will fall from 115,000 in 2024 to between 57,000 and 71,000 by the early 2030s — a roughly 50% decline regardless of what any politician says. That decline is structural, driven by the basin being mostly empty, not by net zero policy.
The right policy question isn’t “do we save these jobs” — they’re going whatever happens. It’s “do we use the next decade to make sure these workers transition into the offshore wind, hydrogen and CCS jobs that are physically growing in the same waters, using overlapping skills?”
The current government’s North Sea Future Plan (November 2025) puts £20 million into retraining and an Energy Skills Passport. Whether that’s enough is a fair argument. Whether the transition is happening at all isn’t.
Chapter 9: Where the “energy independence” argument breaks
Let’s be specific about what energy independence would actually mean.
To be genuinely independent on oil, the UK would need to:
- Produce all its own oil (we don’t, and can’t — the basin is too depleted)
- Refine it domestically (we partly can’t — wrong grades for our refineries)
- Sell it domestically at non-world prices (we can’t — companies sell where prices are highest, which is the global market)
To be genuinely independent on gas, we’d need:
- Produce all our own gas (we currently produce about half)
- Be physically disconnected from the European market (we’re plumbed into it via three pipelines)
- Have enough storage to ride out shocks (we have about 12 days; Germany has 89, France 103, Netherlands 123)
The realistic version of energy independence isn’t about producing more oil and gas. It’s about needing less oil and gas — through electrified heating, transport and industry, with enough domestic clean generation and storage that you can shrug off whatever the world market does.
That’s not a cuddly green talking point. It’s a straightforward strategic logic. Every kilowatt-hour you don’t need to buy on a volatile world market is a kilowatt-hour of energy security.
Chapter 10: The verdict
The political argument for ramping up the North Sea has emotional appeal and genuine force on the jobs question. But the engineering, economic and market evidence cuts hard against it on its central claims.
On reserves: the basin is roughly 93% drained. What’s left is expensive, technically complex, and won’t change the strategic picture.
On prices: drilling more here doesn’t lower prices here. Oil and gas are global commodities. Norway proves it. The data proves it.
On security: even doubling production wouldn’t deliver independence, because we don’t own the oil, can’t refine most of it, and can’t decouple from European gas markets. Reducing demand is a faster route to security than chasing depleted reserves.
On renewables: they are now the cheapest new power. Intermittency is a real engineering challenge that has real engineering answers — interconnectors, storage, pumped hydro, demand response, gas as backup. The build-out is happening, slower than ideal, faster than critics admit.
On jobs: the workforce transition is happening with or without policy, because the basin is running out. The question is whether we manage it well or badly.
None of this makes net zero free, easy or politically painless. It also doesn’t mean every oil and gas decision is automatically wrong. Some tieback projects to existing infrastructure produce gas at lower emissions intensity than imported LNG and are defensible on transition grounds.
But the bigger argument — that we should abandon the clean energy push and bet the economy on a depleted basin — falls apart on contact with the numbers.
The North Sea has been good to Britain for sixty years. It’s tired. Our energy future is going to come from somewhere else, and the sooner we accept that, the better-prepared we’ll be for whatever the world throws at us next.
Sources for this piece include the North Sea Transition Authority, Climate Change Committee, Office for Budget Responsibility, HMRC, DESNZ, Carbon Brief, the Oxford Smith School, Wood Mackenzie, Offshore Energies UK, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, the Supreme Court (Finch v Surrey CC), and the Court of Session. A full evidence dossier is available as a companion document.